Don’t let bad friends influence your business

I bet you have heard this a thousand times: “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.

Yep, this is from the classics we use too much without thinking deeply on them.

Every one of us has friends or at least people who calls “friends”. We drink coffee with these people, we go to the bar, we call them when our car stops working or when we need some money. It’s very hard to find out if these people are our real friends and if they have positive or negative impact on our lives.

I am not going to talk about true friendship here… I will talk about change.

Just an ordinary day of your life - you wake up in the morning, you go to work and when the weekend comes you go out with friends….

Until one day you wake up and everything is different. Somehow you are fed up with this monotony and something has inspired you to think that you must change your life. It could be a book, a movie or something else. Whatever it is… you want new life, because you must achieve something greater.

So far, so good. You might want to work in the IT or get a degree in something. Anyway… from the moment you decide what you want, you will be very busy and if you’re married, you probably will have almost no spare time.

It’s very hard to have free time when you’re devoted to business or carrier. So far your biggest problem was how to get sober during the day so that you can get drunk again in the night.

When you start doing business you get three things in big amounts – documentation, information and headache.

So you’ve started your project and after a hard day in the office, school or whatever your work is, you just need a beer and an interesting movie on which you plan to fall asleep. But somebody else has different plans than yours and that’s your friends. Your phone rings and when you see the name you think about how many times this month you’ve postponed this “meeting” and you remember that you even changed your skype and facebook settings so that nobody will bother you. So you pick up the phone… after several minutes of questions “How can you be so stupid to stay at home on Saturday night?” and some stuff like “You only live once! When are you going to have fun, when you’re 100 years old?” you finally decide that a little bit of distraction won’t be so bad and you go out.

You look around in the bar and this atmosphere seems tedious and somewhat strange… Like there’s something here which is out of place and that thing is you. You look your friends, they are the same, talk the same stuff, but what happens, why you don’t like sitting here, with this company?

You are barely drinking a beer, but everybody else is already on the second one and ordering a third. You are so tired that if you drink another one, you will fall asleep on the table. The conversation seems so meaningless and annoying that you can’t believe it. You remember clearly that until last year you would laugh so hard on this one… and now the only question that pops in your head is: “Dude, why do you even care about this and why are you bothering me with it?”

So you decide to change a little bit the subject and you ask the others the following question: “Did you hear that Apple is now the most expensive company in the world?”

And after that sentence all of your friends shut up and look at you like you have the Loch Ness monster on your forehead and it is biting your nose. You understand that you have said something inappropriate… no, you actually feel it, so you simply just add “I just wanted to buy an Iphone.”

Aaaand everybody start telling you that you don’t need such device and they assure you that their mobile phone is way better than an Iphone without realizing that the model they have spent their salary on is actually a very low-class smart phone. The saddest thing is that there’s a chance that thes people will die before even having a high class smartphone in their pockets.

Sooner or later comes the moment when you leave and realize that you went there just to have fun, but at the moment you are even more tired than you were when you agreed to come. If you know that would happen you could just stay at home or at the office to do something useful instead of torturing yourself this way.

But time passes by and while working on your project you meet people with the same interests as you. In time you start to share business ideas, experience etc.

Once, before going to bed you used to dream about how you will go to the bar with your friends, but in the moment before you fall asleep you dream of how you’re going to found your own company and how are you going to develop it.

But past can’t disappear and the people you used to call “friends” still can see where your life is going (thanks to social media).

Imagine the human development as a 10-storey building. On the last floor is someone who is already a businessman. As you’re going up, you’re developing. Respectively you’re changing your mindset and the way you see the world - often you change your manners, your outfit and even the music you like.

But one of the main problems, which show up is that your friends don’t go up as you do and in many ways, they don’t understand what’s happening to you and why it’s happening, so they simply don’t take you seriously.

I will give you a real life example. You publish some serious post on political or social life subject on social media and in a minute someone from your former friends comments something like “Do you really believe in yourself?” or “It’s Chuck Norris’s fault”….

There’s no need to discuss what made your former friend to do it. The more important is what is happening to you in that moment?

You feel uncomfortable from the other people who are on your friends list or who are following you and which are not familiar with your past. They will simply ask themselves “Who’s that and why is he commenting like this?” Then you will ask yourself “What if he is right, what if I’m taking myself too seriously?”, “What if this is a mistake and it is not for me?”

If you are a little bit of a philosopher, you will save time and you will figure out that these people are not capable of understanding you or evaluating your work. Isn’t it more important to fight for a better future, rather that wasting time in pointless conversations and stupid dilemmas?

A comment is okay, because you can actually delete it and tell that “friend” of yours to shut up and don’t comment on things he knows nothing about.

But a moment comes when you create your own official website and facebook page and you’re going crazy on questions about how to find clients and how to make them come back once you’ve found them…. But then shows up someone from your “friends” who will write something like “hey entrepreneur, can you give me a dollar for a plane”.

You will ask yourself: “Why should I listen to this?” Such events make you think about isn’t it better to bury your past?

My logic is this: If I have a friend, who is true to me and who is supposed to be smart enough to realize that what I’m doing is for good (When you’re unhappy of something- you change it, right?)… is it bad to develop yourself, learn new things, want more for yourself and yes, for the people you can call friends? The answer is: “Of course, not!”

The truth is that after the things I mentioned above I deleted all the profiles that were not suiting me without giving an explanation to anybody. I don’t believe that I owe anyone any of this…

I always tried to explain and teach my friends of what I do. I used to tell them why I’m doing it and what I try to accomplish and that before my eyes, there lies a different world which leads to another dimension, which is more beautiful than the one we used to be in, but I didn’t get any support or approval. I honestly feel nostalgic sometimes for what we used to have and I wish I could’ve helped them to do something more with their lives. But for that purpose, they had to want it.

These are the facts. If you keep contact with people who talk about how they create, develop and learn you will do exactly the same and you will be influenced by them. This influence is based on simple psychology.

The path of entrepreneurship is long and hard. From the beginning for most people it is necessary to take hard decision and it is about who can stay in their life and who can’t walk beside them. Don’t forget that you must live with the consequences of your decision.

Don’t forget that enemy who is pointing your weaknesses is better than a friend who hides them.

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